Travis Nichols is a young poet and novelist who invites readers into a world of relationships gone strange. In his poems, everyday human behaviors become fraught with extraordinary significance. It's a delicate balance of orchestration and improvisationboth dizzying and oddly comforting. The poems, thick with vibrant language and semantic play, hint at a Rimbaudian derangement of the senses while being hyper-alert and completely alive.All my life I've felt destinednot for the greatness of my heroesbut the goodness of their followers.I knew, even when I found a pieceof tooth in my Sausage McMuffin,I would surmount the povertyand dullness of my youth.I knew neither my poverty nor my youthwould be significant enoughto attract attention,only simple enoughto graft onto the great biographies.Even when I felt uncommon and angry enoughto steal balloons from the drug storeand spit red paintballs through a peashooterat people making out in the park I knewI was no Billy the Kid . . .Travis Nichols is an editor at the Poetry Foundation. He is the author of Iowa, a collection of poems, and Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House Press), a novel. He edits the online magazine Weird Deer and regularly contributes to The Believer, Paste, and The Stranger. He lives in Chicago.